Good news for racing? Hey, that is good news. Lydia DePillis on higher yearling sales prices as a sign of economic recovery. Yes, I know that most (okay, almost all) of you don't care.

Emma Roller on Ted Cruz, college debater. Double-extra warning: we know how memory works, or doesn't work. We know how partisanship works. It's highly likely that liberals remembering Ted Cruz from years ago would be either highly selective, or even fairly inaccurate, in their memories -- with their memories matching their current view of Cruz as a jerk. Might he have actually been a jerk? It's certainly possible. Is he a jerk now? I have no idea, and neither do any of you who don't hang out with him regularly. "Work jerk" isn't the same as personal jerk, no matter how much our rational minds resist that idea.

9 comments:

As you know, I was on the APDA circuit in 1991 with Goolsbee and Cruz and the others (tho' oddly I don't remember Dahlia Lithwick at all), and while I have happy memories of beating Princeton A (Panton and Cruz) like a gong, I can't say that he seemed particularly unusual for a Princeton debater. Yes, conservative, as were may of his teammates. Yes, he wore the irritating black-and-orange scarf. Yes, he was ambitious and pretentious, but most of us were.Yes, he whined when the judges went against him, but all of us did that.

I was actually more impressed at the time with Dave Panton, who went on to make a billion dollars as a venture capitalist or some loser thing like that.

Yearling sales are actually bad for racing, because they encourage the worst aspects of the industry (quick retirement of horses, infrequent racing, doping). So if yearling prices are up, that's going to hurt racing.